Once Around the Block, James, and Pick Me Up After My Nap

A child was escorted to the entrance of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, where parents and neighbors have observed an increase in chauffeured luxury cars being used to take children to the Ys nursery school.Credit
Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times

The cars gather in front of the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan about 8:30 a.m. In the front seats sit hired drivers (nobody uses the term chauffeur anymore). The cars are mostly big and mostly black luxury-edition sport utility vehicles like the Mercedes GL-Class or the GMC Yukon Denali. They fill the lanes in front of the Y’s entrance on Lexington Avenue, often two or three rows deep.

It looks like the outside of an arbitrage house just before trading hours, or perhaps the Knicks’ private entrance to Madison Square Garden on game day.

Until, that is, the drivers open the back-seat doors and the passengers’ feet emerge.

These are not the feet of profit-takers or N.B.A. players. These feet wear Sonnet Maryjanes and Primigi sneakers with Velcro closure straps.

These feet are only a half-foot long.

The children — ages 3 through 5 — are enrolled at the Y’s famous nursery school. The livery convention on Lexington Avenue occurs most every weekday. Neighbors of the Y and parents with children in the nursery school say they have seen the number of cars and drivers increase considerably over the past couple of years.

In exasperation, the director of the school, Nancy Schulman, drafted a letter to all families insisting that the drivers wait somewhere else while parents or baby sitters take the children in: find a legal parking space, or take their cars for a few spins around the block.

In the letter, which parents received once in the spring of 2006 and twice this school year, Ms. Schulman played perhaps the only bargaining chip she has, stating that failure to observe this rule could hinder their children’s chances of getting into the kindergarten of their choice.

The letter said that idling cars posed a safety risk, several parents said, and reminded families that one assessment Ms. Schulman and her colleagues are asked to make by lower-school admissions officers is whether the applicant’s parents have been “cooperative” with the school’s requests.

“The letter said, ‘When the ongoing schools ask about your cooperation, I will have no choice but to tell them the truth,’ ” one parent said.

Alix Friedman, a spokeswoman for the school, confirmed the contents of the letter, saying: “Our main concern is the safety and welfare of the children who are being dropped off. We don’t want the child to have to walk through two or three lanes of cars.”

Some parents applauded the action. “Personally, I think it’s great of the Y to do that,” said one mother who takes her child to school by taxi, who was getting coffee inside the Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. “The thing with this place and drivers, it’s revolting. But, obviously, it hasn’t had any effect.”

She nodded toward the window, and its view of the morning’s big-black-car traffic jam.

Like most parents contacted for this article, this mother insisted on anonymity — not, she said, because she had concerns about offending nursery school administrators (Her child has already gotten into the kindergarten of her choice.) or her fellow parents, but because, as she put it, “What good would it do me?”

The Y is hardly the only school in the neighborhood where children get to school by car and driver. Dropoff hour at Nightingale-Bamford, on 92nd Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues, and at Dalton’s lower school, on 91st between Park and Madison, is often clogged by chauffeured S.U.V.’s.

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Dalton’s chief financial officer, Ned Pinger, stands outside every morning to greet students, which often involves opening doors and helping them out of the back seat. “The heads of elementary schools are often outside doing this, and it becomes a little ridiculous,” said Sandra R. Bass, who publishes Private School Insider, a newsletter for New York parents. “You can’t tell who the master is in this situation.”

Myrna Weiss, a former member of the Y’s board of directors and a grandparent of a child at the nursery school, interpreted the use of chauffeurs as a way for parents to protect their children door to door. She added: “It’s also about one-upmanship. That game used to be played much more quietly, over what clubs the parents had their children’s birthday parties at. There weren’t such visible signs of a pecking order.”

Over the course of four mornings this winter, at least 22 chauffeured S.U.V.’s were seen, most of them repeatedly, waiting in front of the school while parents brought in their children. Most of the cars belonged to families who live between Lexington and Fifth Avenues and 70th to 86th Streets. Subsequent research found that an overwhelming majority of the fathers in these families earn a living in the field of capital management — running money for hedge funds or private equity funds — though there was one television executive and one professional athlete. (Anthropologists, take note of other similarities: most couples are in their late 30s and got married at least 10 years ago; many of the parents did not grow up in Manhattan but on Long Island or in Westchester; many of the fathers come from middle-class backgrounds; and a good number of the mothers were raised in notably wealthier circumstances than their husbands).

A public-relations executive, Dan Klores, who owns one of the S.U.V.’s, said he was unaware of Ms. Schulman’s letter. “I don’t have much to do with the place,” he said. “My wife takes my kid by stroller.”

A parent whom other parents identified as a chauffeur-using mother, Alison Schneider, whose husband, Jack Schneider, is a hedge fund manager, said, “I got the letter, but I don’t really have any feelings about it one way or the other. It’s kind of boring. It’s about cars and parking.”

Over the past couple of weeks, a staff member from the Y’s nursery school has been seen directing waiting cars away from the school. The chauffeurs idled in double-parked formation one block farther down Lexington, or around the corner on 91st Street. Posters to the New York bulletin board of the Web site Urbanbaby.com, which is popular with mothers of young children, have occasionally made note of the scene. “So this morning I was at the 92nd Street Y and there were 10 black Escalades and Range Rovers double-parked with huge guys in black suits,” one wrote last month.

The consensus from parents who make use of a driver to deliver their children to school, even if the trip is just a few blocks long, is that time is scarce and they need a full-time driver themselves anyway — to get them to work or appointments. “Plus, I live on the West Side,” one mother said.

In 2002, a government investigation found that Jack B. Grubman, then an analyst with Citigroup, had bragged in an e-mail message that his boss, Sanford I. Weill, had helped get his twins into the Y’s nursery school after Mr. Grubman upgraded his rating on a stock as a favor to Mr. Weill. Meanwhile, Mr. Weill arranged for Citigroup to donate $1 million to the 92nd Street Y.

“The cars and drivers are the first thing you notice about the school,” Victoria Goldman, a co-author of The Manhattan Directory of Private Nursery Schools, said of the Y. “It’s very in-your-face. But that’s the population they engender. How do you think they got a retractable playroof?”

David G. Liston, the chairman of Manhattan Community Board 8, which represents the Upper East Side, said he had not heard of any complaints about the cars. “But I’ve definitely gone past the Y and seen lots of cars lined up full of people who do not appear to be parents of these kids,” he said. “It’s probably just a fact of life on the Upper East Side.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Once Around the Block, James, and Pick Me Up After My Nap. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe